YouTube adds closed captioning to videos

The web's biggest video site is now adding captions to its videos. From now on, all videos uploaded will have optional captions transcribed from the audio through Google's speech recognition system. This is a massive expansion of YouTube's closed captioning service, which debuted last year for a small handful of videos across certain partners.

The speech recognition is erratic, but fortunately users can download the text transcripts of the captions and edit them manually. Also, it seems that videos with a lot of background noise or little dialogue don't get automatically transcribed through the service. When it does get transcribed, though, you can count on the captions being either helpful or hilarious.